Believing they are losing the messaging war with progressives, a group of prominent conservatives in Washington—including the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner—has been meeting privately since early this year to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for "a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation," according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.

Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell—including aides to congressional Republicans—cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and "clueless" GOP congressional leaders. They devise strategies for killing immigration reform, hyping the Benghazi controversy, and countering the impression that the GOP exploits racism. And the Groundswell gang is mounting a behind-the-scenes organized effort to eradicate the outsize influence of GOP über-strategist/pundit Karl Rove within Republican and conservative ranks. (For more on Groundswell's "two front war" against Rove—a major clash on the right—click here.)

One of the influential conservatives guiding the group is Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, a columnist for the Daily Caller and a tea party consultant and lobbyist. Other Groundswell members include John Bolton, the former UN ambassador; Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy; Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; Gayle Trotter, a fellow at the Independent Women's Forum; Catherine Engelbrecht and Anita MonCrief of True the Vote; Allen West, the former GOP House member; Sue Myrick, also a former House GOPer; Diana Banister of the influential Shirley and Banister PR firm; and Max Pappas, a top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Among the conveners listed in an invitation to a May 8 meeting of Groundswell were Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News Network; Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who resoundingly lost a Maryland Senate race last year (and is now running for a House seat); Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society; Sandy Rios, a Fox News contributor; Lori Roman, a former executive director of the American Legislative Exchange Council; and Austin Ruse, the head of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. Conservative journalists and commentators participating in Groundswell have included Breitbart News reporters Matthew Boyle and Mike Flynn, Washington Examiner executive editor Mark Tapscott, and National Review contributor Michael James Barton.
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WASHINGTON — The 20 states choosing not to expand Medicaid will lose billions of dollars in federal funds, according to a new study released Thursday.

By 2022, Texas could lose $9.2 billion by not expanding Medicaid as allowed under the Affordable Care Act, while Florida could lose $5 billion over that period, the study conducted by The Commonwealth Fund shows. Commonwealth was founded in 1918 to improve health services for Americans.

Also during that period, the study showed, Georgia could lose $2.9 billion, while Virginia could lose $2.8 billion.

"There are no states where the taxpayers would actually gain by not expanding Medicaid," said Sherry Glied, lead author on the study. "Nobody wins."
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The Affordable Care Act requires the federal government to pay 100 percent of the costs of expanding Medicaid for three years. After that period, the law mandates the federal government pay 90 percent of the costs of expansion.

The 10 percent investment that would be left to the states, the study’s authors conclude, would be justified by the huge investments from the federal government.

“States that choose to participate in the Medicaid expansion will gain considerable new federal funds,” the study’s authors write. “States often seek to increase their share of federal funds, lobbying for military bases, procurement contracts, and highway funds. Federal funding provides direct benefits and bolsters local economies.”

Conversely, states that refuse Medicaid expansion will continue to be on the hook for billions in uncompensated care costs – as when uninsured residents visit the emergency room. By refusing to expand Medicaid, Texas will forgo $9.2 billion in federal funding in 2022, the authors said. Florida, another state that has said it won’t expand Medicaid, stands to lose more than $5 billion.
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Twenty-three states are currently not planning to move forward with the Medicaid expansion, which was meant to cover millions of low-income Americans. The population they leave behind is mostly young, minority, single adults, according to two new data briefs from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Their analysis is one of the most in-depth looks at the population that falls into this coverage gap, too poor to qualify for insurance subsidies (those are available only to those who earn above the poverty line, about $12,000 for an individual). They're also shut out of the traditional Medicaid program, which tends to cover low-income parents, children and those with disabilities.kff1



Kaiser estimates that approximately 4.8 million people will fall into this no man's land of health-care reform, where they do have the option to purchase private insurance on the individual market -- but would have to do so without any financial help from the government.

Three-quarters of those who will fall into this coverage gap are adults who do not have children. As Kaiser notes, this reflects the limitations on the current Medicaid program. While some states do use the publicly-funded program to cover low-income, single adults, that's the exception rather than the rule. Nine states currently offer coverage to adults, with income limits that range from 10 to 200 percent of the poverty line ($1,1490 to $22,980, respectively).
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Actually, the average incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans have grown steadily over the last century or so, especially when compared to the flat-lining incomes for the bottom 90 percent of Americans. But as you can see in the above chart, it wasn't until the 1980s that the rich really started to pull away from the normals.

We created the chart using the World Income Database, a collection of data compiled by a group of economists who focus on the incomes of the rich, poor and middle-class. The chart plots the average income of the top 1 percent of American earners against the average income for the bottom 90 percent of Americans between 1913 and 2012, using real 2012 dollars.

In 2012, the top 1 percent took home more than $1 million on average, while the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans was $30,438. Compare that to 1917, when the top 1 percent's average income was just under $300,000 and the bottom 90 percent took home slightly more than $11,000 on average.

So how is it that the U.S. income gap has grown large enough for us to claim the title of worst inequality in the developed world? There are a variety of explanations:
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The U.S. Has The Worst Income Inequality In The Developed World, Thanks To Wall Street: Study

A new paper by economists Facundo Alvaredo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez lays out just how much better at making inequality the U.S. is than everybody else and tries to explain how it got that way.

Since the 1970s, the top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. has roughly doubled its share of the total American income pie to nearly 20 percent from about 10 percent, according to the paper. This gain is easily the biggest among other developed countries, the researchers note. You can see this in the chart below, taken from the paper, which maps the income gains of the top 1 percent in several countries against the massive tax breaks most of them have gotten in the past several decades. (Story continues after chart.)





The higher the dot, the more income inequality has grown in that country. See the red dot waaaay up in the left-hand corner, far away from everybody else? That is the United States, where the top earners have made more while getting their taxes slashed by over 40 percent.

This echoes an OECD study from earlier this year that found the U.S. had the highest income inequality in the developed world. It followed only Chile, Mexico and Turkey among all nations.
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Bitter ideological warfare among commissioners [font size="+1"]and congressionaland White House indifference[/font] have yielded an agency less able to fulfill its stated mission: to “prevent corruption in the federal campaign process by administering, enforcing and formulating policy.”

Two newly minted commissioners, Republican Lee Goodman and Democrat Ann Ravel, have pledged to find common ground and work to strengthen the FEC’s standing. Odds are that they’ll lead the agency next year as chairman and vice chairman. The other commissioners talk of the agency reasserting itself after months when the six-member commission operated with only four or five slots filled.

But plenty of folks don’t believe them. The roots of the agency’s dysfunction remain in place, reformers and some former commissioners argue. Only wholesale reforms, they say, could pull the FEC from plunging into irrelevancy.

“The commission just seems to look inward and almost wonder aloud if a decision has an ideological impact, and if so, they shy away from it,” said Frank P. Reiche, a Republican who served as an FEC commissioner from 1979 to 1985. “It’s sad — very sad — and the agency is almost doomed to failure for carrying out its statutory mission unless reform measures are implemented and adopted by Congress.”
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...In 2010, most of the world’s wealthy nations, although still deeply depressed in the wake of the financial crisis, turned to fiscal austerity: slashing spending and, in some cases, raising taxes in an effort to reduce budget deficits that had surged as their economies collapsed. Basic economics said that austerity in an already depressed economy would deepen the depression. But the “austerians,” as many of us began calling them, insisted that spending cuts would lead to economic expansion, because they would improve business confidence.

The result came as close to a controlled experiment as one ever gets in macroeconomics. Three years went by, and the confidence fairy never made an appearance. In Europe, where the austerian ideology took hold most firmly, the nascent economic recovery soon turned into a double-dip recession. In fact, at this point key measures of economic performance in both the euro area and Britain are lagging behind where they were at this stage of the Great Depression.

It’s true that the human cost has been nothing like what happened in the 1930s. But that’s thanks to government policies like employment protection and a strong social safety net — the very policies austerians insisted must be dismantled in the name of “structural reform.”

Was it really austerity that did the damage? Well, the correlation is very clear: the harsher the austerity, the worse the growth performance. Consider the case of Ireland, one of the first nations to impose extreme austerity, and widely cited in early 2010 as a role model. Three years later, after repeated declarations that its economy had turned the corner, Ireland still has double-digit unemployment, even though hundreds of thousands of working-age Irish citizens have emigrated.
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Glaciologists fear they may have seriously underestimated the potential for melting ice sheets to contribute to catastrophic sea-level rises in coming decades which could see increases of a metre or more by 2100.

The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contain about 99.5 per cent of the Earth's glacier ice and could raise sea levels by 65 metres if they melted completely – although experts think this is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future. However, a survey of the world's top 26 glaciologists found most believe melting of the ice sheets could be more rapid and severe than previously estimated. They believe that melting of the ice sheets alone this century would be likely to raise the average global sea level by 29cm, the poll found, but there is a five per cent chance of it increasing even further by a catastrophic 84cm.

This would take the total sea-level increase to well over a metre if other factors such as the thermal expansion of oceans and runoff from mountain glaciers are taken into account.

"Our analysis shows the biggest uncertainty when it comes to sea levels is the contribution from the ice sheets," said Professor Jonathan Bamber of Bristol University, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"It shows glaciologists believe there is a one-in-20 chance of sea levels rising by a metre or more by 2100, and a metre rise in sea level is really very serious.
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